Along with the movement away from the audio-lingual method in the 1970s and
towards a communicative approach in the 1980s, second language acquisition (SLA)
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also shifted from a focus on teachers to a focus on learners. This era also gave birth to
the notion and importance of what we know today as learner strategies. The notion of
learning strategies was born in two fields that have developed it independently:
cognitive psychology and second language acquisition. The former tried to analyze
the strategies that experts employ and then train novices to use them as well. The
latter preferred to describe the kinds of strategies that are used (Griffiths and Parr,
2001).